Klaus Schmidt at Tedxprague (Transcript)

What is Göbekli Tepe: Klaus Schmidt at TEDxPrague (Transcript)

Klaus Schmidt – TEDx Talk TRANSCRIPT

Ladies and gentlemen, now we are going a little bit under the surface, we are coming to archeology and to a project which is one of the most important projects of the last years.

Those are not only my words – I am the director of this project – but it is internationally told like this. It’s a project in southeastern Turkey, the site called Göbekli Tepe.

Göbekli Tepe means ‘mound with belly.’ It’s just its name, an old name from the map. We didn’t invent this name, but it shows a little bit, or it’s recognizable – we’ve some natural limestone plateau here and all this mound which is not a natural mound but an artificial mound, this is the belly on the mound explaining the name.

The project is done by the German Archeological Institute where I come from too, but in close cooperation with the local authorities, especially the General Directorate for Antiquities in Ankara, and the University of Sanliurfa, the Harran University, and some other institutions, mainly responsible for the conservation and the restoration of the site.

For the scientific work, we have financing mainly from the German Research Foundation which is financing the project, which is a long-term project. We are now in the 20th year of work, and we hope to continue for many, many years in the future.

Okay, that’s the framing. I have to say all this: who are the institutions and who is giving money for our work at the site.

BUT WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS SITE?

At first, I already showed you this location. It’s a huge limestone ridge, and this artificial mound is on top of it. Such artificial mounds are very common in the Near East. They are called ‘tell’ in Arabic language or ‘tepe’ or ‘höyük’ in Turkish language. I think some will know ‘Çatalhöyük, ‘ an old Neolithic site in central Anatolia, and Göbekli is a site like this, but it has some specifics, it’s a unique site because it’s much older than all the other ones. It belongs to the 10th and 9th millennium BC.

So, it means, roughly spoken, some monuments there are 12,000 years old, 12,000 before today, or 10,000, the 10th millennium BC. That’s just after the Ice Age. Who knows a bit about geology, knows that the Ice Age was a global phenomenon.

Now, with the ice corings in Greenland, we can date it very, very exactly. It was not a long process, the end of the Ice Age. It was what we call a rapid climate change. A very rapid

development, around 9,600. And that’s the time when the building activity at Göbekli started.

I told you, an artificial mound made by humans by erecting buildings, walls, and other things above each other. So, the mound was created. This is not so special in the Near East, but, as I told you, the time frame, 10th-9th millennium, that’s very strange.

We didn’t expect it in this time, when all over the world, people were still hunter-gatherers, that they had been able to produce such buildings, to do such huge work and much more.

We will see some examples of the world of Göbekli Tepe, which is such an unexpected and unknown world before. Many say Göbekli Tepe is changing the history. That’s not true, it’s not changing it, but it’s adding a very important chapter to the history of humanity, a chapter we didn’t know that it existed before.

And this chapter is about the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farming, to food- producing societies. This is a form of subsistence that our basis agrarian societies are still based on, and this was invented in this region at this time.

This region is the Near East. We will see some maps later. And here, about the mound, an aerial view.

When we started the project in ’95, what we could see was nearly nothing, just trees and fields. It was used for agriculture by the local people, but the surface findings had been showing us very clearly the importance of the site, and the dating by diagnostic flint tools and other tools. Pottery is not existent, not yet invented.

So, we call this stage in archeology the pre-pottery Neolithic culture, before the invention of pottery, but it’s the beginning of the Neolithic.

The Neolithic period means food producing period in our terms. To understand the importance of Göbekli Tepe we have to enlarge our frame to a global view.

On this map in red you see all the regions in the world where this transition from hunter- gatherer cultures to food-producing cultures happened independently from each other. We have some regions in Meso-America, South America, in the South-East, and, of course you are right, this are the numbers BC written about some.

In Africa very late in comparison to this core area in the Near East where the transition happened around 9,000, or late 10th, early 9th millennium. The region, in the long time, we

call the Fertile Crescent of the Near East because in the South we have the Arabian desert, to the North the Mountains of the Taurus and the Zagros Mountains.

This is the area with the most favorable climatic conditions, the most favorable geographic conditions: the Fertile Crescent. For a long time, we thought that the western wing was important regarding the development of earlier agrarian civilizations, but now we understand, through research not only by our team, but by many teams, and in the national groups of American, French, British, Turkish, Italian, Japanese, German, and other archaeologists working in this region, we understand that there is something like a Golden Triangle within this Fertile Crescent where the most important things are going on.

And Göbekli Tepe is located in the Golden Triangle, and it has a very important role. We will see some of the monuments that we are excavating there. The other sites marked here in red belong to this time, to the 10th-9th millennium, but these are settlements of this period. Settlements of settled hunters-gatherers.

It was a new discovery of 20-25 years ago, that we already have settled hunters-gatherers. We thought that hunters-gatherers are always nomadic, but in this region they changed their life already before the invention of food-producing.

Göbekli Tepe is not a settlement. It belongs to it, but is only a sanctuary, or many sanctuaries together. We’ll see examples.

Neolithic, just to have an idea of what it means: from wild to domestic. Mainly here from wild to domestic cereals, they are getting much bigger. With animals it’s a little more difficult, which is the reason why only four animals had been domesticated. That’s a beginning: goat, sheep, cattle, and pig.

We exclude the dog; it was domesticated earlier, by the hunters-gatherers already. But it’s a different story, it was domesticated not for meat production, but to be the fellow of the hunters.

But this means Neolithic societies, food-producing societies, on the base of domesticated species, plants, and animals.

Our prediction that this site of Göbekli Tepe is so important was completely fulfilled during the excavations. Here the excavation work in an aerial view from 2011 with several areas. And there are many findings, like these flint tools; very common. Or findings like sculptures.

The flints are known from everywhere, but not such large-scale sculptures like these ones or

composite monuments like this totem pole sculpture with several elements on top: maybe a lion, here an eye, an ear, and below a human and another human.

A very exciting composition and an art, which we didn’t know before, which is challenging our ability to interpret. And the most important monumental architecture — sorry, I’m mixing here — monumental architecture: mainly ovals or circles with pillars, delineated by pillars.

Two of the pillars are very big ones, always in the center, and the pillars always T-shaped. This strange T-shape we can understand — here another view of these enclosures: the surrounding oval with some T-shapes which are smaller, and the central pillars here, the T- shapes.

Fortunately, we can understand the meaning of these T-shapes, which at first seem a little bit strange. Highly stylized humans are depicted because in some cases we have arms depicted, we have the hands, the fingers, and some parts of garment are depicted.

So, the T-shapes are stylized humans, and very often in Göbekli Tepe we have animals depicted like attributes on the T-shapes. The T-shapes are unique in history. We don’t have T-shapes in the Palaeolithic period before, we don’t have them after the time of Göbekli Tepe, which ends with the 9th millennium.

There are just some very rough comparisons like the ‘taulas’ in Menorca, but this is a very different function, a very different meaning. It’s really a table: ‘taula’ means table. These are tables, no connection with the T-shapes of Göbekli Tepe.

These T-shapes are so important because looking back to the upper Palaeolithic art like Lascaux, Altamira, or the recently discovered caves of Chauvet or Cosquer: here the animals are always dominant, the animals are at the center.

In Göbekli now we have the human form, being the superior form, and it’s clear: there is a connection with the phenomenon of domestication because now the human is the boss, and the animals are reduced to attributes of the humans.

Some impressions of the excavations of these circles, of these enclosures, here for example with in situ, in original position, the central pillars with a height of 5.50 meters on top of the original floor.

We didn’t erect anything. It’s all found in its original position. We are really very lucky to have the chance to excavate such an exciting, such an important site like Göbekli Tepe. This

is unique, there is no parallel, there is no comparison.

We have contemporaneous sites as I told you, but they don’t have this kind of monumental art and monumental pillars. Very often we have combinations of motives depicted. They are very rich, showing a narrative character, showing that we have illustrations of stories of mythological stories in front of us.

And even more, when we look to this part, we have objects of unknown function, but we have animals: a bird, a quadruped, a reptile, a frog. And such an association together with the objects is very similar to things we know, for example, from old Egypt, 4th millennium Egypt, on slate palettes.

So started the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing in the same way. The sign of city and animals added to it, but in Göbekli Tepe it came to its end. There was no continuation.

Unfortunately, Göbekli had been completely abandoned for unknown reasons so far. In Egypt, from these beginnings the invention of the hieroglyphic writing started. Göbekli Tepe is part of this story, but with a big interruption.

Here we have the image being an image, we have the transformation into what in German we call the Bildzeichen, and from these Bildzeichen other signs are developing, and here we are coming to our letter alpha or A. You can easily understand it. But this is a discontinuation of many thousands years between Göbekli Tepe around 9,000 and the invention of true writing around 3,000.

There are at least 6,000 years of a gap we tried to fill, but for the moment, we don’t know how to fill it. But we want to continue our work. Hopefully young colleagues will continue the research on this very exciting period of mankind.

One colleague said – it’s not from me – “Göbekli Tepe seems to be the most smoking gun in archeology at the moment”. I think it’s really true because we have so many unexpected new results, which are changing our ability to interpret.

And we can see, reconstruct that there was something like a cultist community. Göbekli Tepe with its sanctuaries was no settlement, but there were settlements around Göbekli Tepe.

And our zoologists can recognize from the archaeofauna, from the animal bones, discovered in Göbekli and the other sites, that the early domestication of cattle was done on the Syrian Euphrates, sheep on the Turkish Euphrates, goat in the Taurus Mountains, and pig in the

Tigris basin.

Independently from each other, but very quickly. All these discoveries, these inventions had been brought together to what we call the Neolithic package.

This Neolithic package enables people to be superior to their neighbors, to those neighbors that are still being hunters-gatherers. Now the farming way of life was invented, and was spreading all over Europe. We saw this map at the beginning with the distribution of this new way of life.

How did people come to Göbekli Tepe? How do you bring a lot of people there to be able to erect this monumental architecture? Of course not just by saying: “Hello, come and we work”, no. Feasting. Big feasting. We can expect big feasting to have happened at the mound, so people came there and so they had the power for working events on the side.

We have a lot of experimental archeology on how to move monoliths, on how to move big stones. But we fortunately also have some authentic photos from Indonesia done by European travelers, showing how megaliths are being actually moved for the construction of the tomb of a king.

We can be very sure in Göbekli Tepe it was looking similar. This in short a story which is just a rough framing of a story of results. Not only my results: this is teamwork. Archeology usually is teamwork, including local workers from the nearby villages, including students from Europe and Turkey, including scientists, specialists in archaeofauna, botany, and other things.

We will try to continue for many years and to answer many of the still open questions about this unexpected and exciting world of hunters-gatherers, who changed to become farmers, and who changed the world history.

Thank you.

Resources for Further Reading:

A Brie(f) History of Cheese: Paul Kindstedt (Transcript)

The History of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith (Transcript)

The Secret History of Silicon Valley by Steve Blank (Transcript)

Alice Gorman on Space Archaeology at TEDxSydney (Transcript)